Sarah Palin for Veterans Affairs? A Wrestling Impresario for Small Business?

President-elect Donald J. Trump wants to keep New York’s crusading United States attorney on board, and is reportedly eyeing the professional wrestling impresario Linda McMahon for the Small Business Administration. And a new name has popped up to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs: Sarah Palin.

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Steven Mnuchin, the Trump administration’s pick for Treasury secretary, spoke with reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower on Wednesday.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Trump eyeing Sarah Palin for Veterans Affairs?

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ massive network of hospitals and clinics has been under a microscope since scandalously long waiting lists and allegations of cover-ups burst into public. The management morass seemed so intractable that in 2014, President Obama pushed out a decorated former general, Eric Shinseki, and hired a former chief executive of Procter & Gamble, Robert A. McDonald, to sort it out.

Now, according to people close to the transition, Mr. Trump is thinking of taking Veterans Affairs in a new direction, handing its reins to former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Given Mr. Trump’s passionate campaign pledges to the nation’s veterans, the response — if she is chosen — would be ... interesting.

A wrestling impresario talks Small Business Administration.

Spotted at Trump Tower on Wednesday afternoon: Linda McMahon, the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, an outfit the president-elect has some experience with.

“The meeting went great,” she told reporters. “It was really nice to be up, and I was honored to be asked to come in. Anytime I think the president-elect of the United States asks you to come in for a conversation, you’re happy to do that. We talked about business and entrepreneurs and creating jobs, and we talked about S.B.A.”

Her connections to Mr. Trump go beyond their mutual love of bloated men in spandex suits. Her net worth, estimated at around $855 million, would put her in the same income brackets as the candidates tapped to be the secretaries of Commerce, Treasury and Education, as well as the deputy Commerce secretary.

Democrats push Obama on Russia-election connection.

Senate Democrats, unable to get their Republican counterparts involved, are looking at a new recruit to examine allegations of Russian tampering with the elections: President Obama.

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In a letter, written by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and signed by fellow members of the intelligence committee, seven senior Democrats asked the president to declassify and release “additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election.” They cryptically added: “We are conveying specifics through classified channels.”

Federal ethics office tweets to Trump: Divest

The Office of Government Ethics is usually a pretty quiet corner of the federal government, but when ethics officials thought that the president-elect had vowed to sell off all of his assets into a blind trust, they came alive.

In a series of Twitter posts, the ethics office was full of praise ... for something Mr. Trump hasn’t actually done yet.

Then:

And:

And finally, the coup de grâce:

In fact, Mr. Trump has not said exactly what he will do, beyond a promised news conference on Dec. 15 to reveal his plans for his business empire.

A crusading federal prosecutor stays on.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan who has built a reputation as a fierce prosecutor of public corruption cases, said on Wednesday that he intended to remain in office under President-elect Trump’s administration.

Mr. Bharara, who was appointed in 2009 by Mr. Obama, disclosed his intention to stay on after emerging from a meeting with the president-elect at Trump Tower.

Mr. Bharara told reporters that Mr. Trump had asked to meet with him to discuss “whether or not I’d be prepared to stay on as the United States attorney to do the work as we have done it, independently, without fear or favor for the last seven years.”

“We had a good meeting,” Mr. Bharara continued. “I said I would absolutely consider staying on. I agreed to stay on.”

Mr. Bharara said that he had already talked to Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican of Alabama who is Mr. Trump’s choice to be attorney general. “He also asked that I stay on, and so I expect that I will be continuing,” Mr. Bharara said.

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Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, met with Mr. Trump on Wednesday.CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times

Treasury pick makes promises.

Appearing on the business cable channel CNBC, Steven Mnuchin, Mr. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, made a series of promises and pledges sure to be remembered in the years to come:

“This will be the largest tax change since Reagan. ... We’re going to cut corporate taxes, which will bring huge amounts of jobs back to the United States. We’re going to get to 15 percent, and we’re going to bring a lot of cash back to the U.S.”

■ But it will provide no net benefit to the rich.

“There will be a big tax cut for the middle class. Any tax cuts for the upper class will be offset by less deductions that pay for it.”

Details? Not many, but he did hint that he will push to cap the mortgage deduction for mega-mansions and second homes.

■ The top regulatory priority will be eliminating “parts” of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul that discourage lending, but the administration will not push for a full repeal. Mr. Mnuchin:

“As we look at Dodd-Frank, the No. 1 problem with Dodd-Frank is it’s way too complicated, and it cuts back lending. We want to strip back parts of Dodd-Frank that prevent banks from lending. That will be the No. 1 priority on the regulatory side.”

More cabinet announcements this week? Maybe not.

The president-elect is full of surprises, but absent a big one, Wednesday morning’s announcements may be all we get for the rest of the week.

In addition to Mr. Mnuchin, there were Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, for commerce secretary, and Todd Ricketts, part of the Ameritrade fortune and a part owner of the Chicago Cubs, for deputy commerce secretary.

The Trump cabinet, assuming it is confirmed, will be worth billions of dollars (add Mr. Trump’s previously announced education secretary pick, Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune). But the team is not shying away from its Wall Street and moneyed roots.

Mr. Mnuchin said on CNBC:

“One of the good things about both Wilbur and I — we have actually been bankers. We were the only two people during the financial crisis that were issued licenses by the government. We’ve been in the business of regional banking and we understand what it is to make loans. That’s the engine of growth to small and medium sized businesses.”

With Republicans expected to hold 52 seats in the Senate, blocking confirmation would be hard, but Democrats signaled that both men would face tough questioning.

Mr. Mnuchin’s time atop a Los Angeles bank known for its foreclosures will definitely come up, as suggested by a joint comment released Wednesday by Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“During the campaign, Donald Trump told the American people that he was going to change Washington by taking on Wall Street. Donald Trump’s choice for Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, is just another Wall Street insider. That is not the type of change that Donald Trump promised to bring to Washington — that is hypocrisy at its worst. After his bank pocketed billions in taxpayer dollars from the bailout, Mnuchin moved on to make a fortune running another bank that aggressively foreclosed on families still reeling from the crisis. This pick makes clear that Donald Trump wants to cater to the same Wall Street executives that have hurt working families time and again.”

Team Twitter: Update your ‘following’ list.

Depends on your definition of ‘populist.’

Among the president-elect himself, his commerce secretary pick, his deputy commerce pick, his education secretary choice and his prospective Treasury secretary, much of Mr. Trump’s team ranges from multimillionaires to billionaires. And that doesn’t include Ms. McMahon, no slouch on the money front.

So is the incoming administration truly populist?

Anthony Scaramucci, the financier and Trump transition official, had some thoughts Wednesday:

“Well, it depends on how you define populist. If you’re talking about an administration that’s focused on the potential for the United States and the potential for the American people and where Mr. Trump wants to be president for everybody, which includes the working class and the middle class, then I guess by that definition. But I don’t know. It depends on what your definition of populist — sometimes there’s a misnomer to that definition that’s somewhat of a pejorative. I don’t see it that way. What I do see is that the people that I grew up with, which are basically the working class people of the United States, they need a break. And we need to switch them from going from the working class into the working poor into what I call the aspirational working class, which my dad was a member of.”

Are millionaires and billionaires really “draining the swamp”?

“You want some people that are insiders and understand the system, and some outsiders that are creative thinkers, out of the box thinkers and disrupters. If you can get that blend right, then you’ll be able to effect change in Washington. I think if you put too many of one or the other, if you have status quo presiders, well nothing’s going to change. If you have too many status quo disrupters, Washington is a very healthy immunological system, you’ll see a full blown organ rejection.”

A new name in the hopper?

Mary Fallin, Oklahoma’s conservative Republican governor, is under consideration for interior secretary. Ms. Fallin had been floated as a potential vice-presidential nominee shortly before the Republican National Convention over the summer. Her aide, Steve Mullins, is also being mentioned for a top staff post if she gets the job.

And no, Mr. President-elect, it wasn’t a landslide.

With Alabama and New Mexico certifying their votes, an update is in order. Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead over Mr. Trump climbed overnight to 2,370,700 — or 1.8 percentage points. Eleven states and the District of Columbia now record a higher percentage of votes for Mrs. Clinton than President Obama received in 2012.

Trump says he’ll move away from business, but how?

Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he would leave his “great business in total” before moving into the Oval Office, promising further details next month about his efforts to avoid conflicts of interest as he becomes the nation’s 45th president.

It is unclear whether the steps Mr. Trump is prepared to take would be enough to satisfy ethics experts who say that putting his children in charge of the business would not be enough to ensure that his official decisions are independent of his personal financial ones. His daughter Ivanka has attended a number of meetings with heads of state since the election, and she would be one of the main officers of the Trump Organization.

In an interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Trump said that presidents “can’t have a conflict of interest” and that it would be extremely difficult to sell his businesses because they are real estate holdings.

Correction:

An earlier version of this briefing misstated which one of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s sons took a deer-hunting trip to Turkey. It was Donald Jr., not Eric.

Correction:

A picture caption on Thursday with a Transition Briefing item about Sarah Palin’s being considered by President-elect Donald J. Trump for the top job at the Department of Veterans Affairs misstated who won the Iowa caucuses. It was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, not Mr. Trump.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Sarah Palin for Veterans Affairs? A Wrestling Impresario for Small Business?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe